Month: February 2019

As I type, springtime is making its welcome arrival, I’m in early-but-promising talks about a new professional project and I’m in a good mood all round. This is despite the fact that I’ve been immersing myself in book after book of unrelenting depravity.

Why? Well, the Splatterpunk Awards are in town again! Like last year, I’ve decided to read and review every single finalist on the ballot. In the process, I’ve built myself a not-inconsiderable to-be-read pile, hewn entirely from the lowest impulses of humanity.

In other news, I’m still preparing the crowdfunding campaign for Midnight Widows. Right now I’m getting started on the promotional video, my friend (and fellow Horror Honey alumna) Kim having been nice enough to provide a voiceover. The campaign is still on track to go live this spring.

I write regularly about the Hugo Awards, the Dragon Awards and the new-fangled Splatterpunk Awards, but I tend not to write about the Stoker Awards. Perhaps I should start — it could be interesting. I doubt I could fit in every category, or even every novel category, but there are some worthwhile angles I could still take. Maybe someday I’ll start a retrospective of the winners; or perhaps I could dig into the comic category — it’d bring back lovely memories of being the Comics Honey for Belladonna. Or maybe a spotlight on the First Novel category, to help celebrate new talent?

Continuing my year-long series on the history of vampire fiction, as it developed since John Polidori’s The Vampyre”. This month I’m pushing on through the nineteenth century to look at how women — by they female characters or female authors — helped to shape the genre. Head on over to Women Write About Comics for more!

If you enjoy this or other articles I’ve written, perhaps you’ll consider making a small donation to my Patreon.

Pauline Kael famously remarked that movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them. I’d like to offer a variation on that thought: that Hollywood films are so rarely original that we should be prepared to commend inspired unoriginality.

For a prime example of inspired unoriginality, take 2017’s Happy Death Day. It was Groundhog Day done as a campus slasher. It wore its influences on its sleeve, and proceeded to rub that sleeve on the audience’s faces saying LOOK LOOK DO YOU SEE THESE ARE MY INFLUENCES HERE THEY ARE.

And the audience (or at least, this member of the audience) says “oh, yeah, Groundhog Day as a campus slasher. That’s a pretty solid premise. Good on you for coming up with it.”

The book is due for release in late May, and goes into detail about the origins and inspirations of the classic 1932 film The Mummy. If you like to explore the nooks and crannies of horror history, it should be up your alley.

British readers of a certain generation might recall a partwork series about paranormal phenomena called The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time, which ran from 1980 to 1983. And even if — like me — you weren’t around to catch the original magazine during its 156-issue run, you might have come across the various books reprinting its articles, which continue to turn up regularly in “esoteric” sections of second-hand bookshops.

The Unexplained wasn’t overly credulous: its writers were unafraid to bring up mundane explanations for the various phenomena they covered. Granted, the magazine worked on the understanding that mundane explanations were generally less interesting than the ones involving ghosts, aliens or psychic powers – but if we approach the magazine as an exercise in cataloguing modern folklore, this standpoint is no bad thing.

I myself have fond memories of devouring Unexplained reprints as a teenager, and more recently I’ve managed to get my hands on a complete run of the original magazine. So, I thought it’d be interesting to take a look through it right from the beginning…